Symphony of Scars
by Dertt
Summary: William has always lived with a darkness able to manifest itself in images. When a mysterious force leads him to a town full of darkness which manifests itself in monsters, he must find a connection between himself and the living nightmare of Silent Hill.
1. An Ominous Message

A light poured forth from behind a cracked door, rapidly flooding the room as the door swung open.

William's eyes reacted to the light before he did; they involuntarily sprung open as his bed was bathed in the intrusive brightness.  
His eyelids felt like they weighed a couple tons.

After a brief struggle with his facial muscles, he pushed his eyes back shut, emitted a groan, and turned onto his side.  
It was then that he noticed the covers had somehow escaped from him during the night.

He opened his eyes again, only slightly, to attempt to locate the missing covers, and instantaneously he became aware of the door being open.  
It was strange, he thought, because he always shut the door completely before going to bed.

Staring at the white light beyond the threshold of his room, William's mind momentarily ceased to function, as it often did in the mornings, before coming to the realisation that some outside force must have opened his door.

An expression of vexation befell his face as he sat up, legs over the side of his bed, and leaned toward his dresser to retrieve an undershirt. He found a grey one and quickly pulled it over his head.

Upon turning back in the door's direction, he saw something that nearly caused his heart to stop.

A figure, silhouetted in the light, stood in his doorway. From the outline, it appeared to be a young girl, standing about one meter tall and wearing a mid-length dress which ended in lacy trim.

Several thoughts spilled into his mind, the most logical being that this was his younger sister, and his family had decided to surprise him by stopping by.

_I should have never given Mom a key, _he thought. _What is it, seven in the morning? On a Saturday?_

"Sylvie?" He asked of the figure.  
No response came.  
"Sylvie, what are you doing in my apartment?"

The figure began to lift its left arm, hesitated, then continued. It, or_she_, held a hand up as if to say "stop."

William rubbed his eyes and sighed impatiently.  
"Are you here with Mom?" He questioned.

"Silent Hill." The figure spoke. Or at least, a voice spoke from the figure's direction. It was deep, raspy… not the voice of a young girl, and certainly not the voice of his sister.

"The hell…" William muttered. He wasn't quite ready for his brain to start acting up.  
He turned his head to the left, stared out the window for a second at how it was still dark outside, and rapidly returned his gaze to the door.

The figure was still there, only now it was sitting down, as if waiting for him to do something specific.  
"Silent Hill." It hissed.

William squeezed his eyes shut tightly.  
"You're going to be gone when I open my eyes," he said in a low voice.  
Much to his surprise, it worked; when his eyes opened, they were greeted by the sight of an empty doorway.

The image remained, however… though it didn't ring as sharply in his mind as the words.

"…Silent…Hill?"

* * *

Annie grimaced at the deep red fluid spreading across the floor tiles. With shaking hands, she reached for the handheld radio affixed to her waist.  
She grasped it tightly as she brought it up to her mouth. Before speaking, she drew a deep breath, paused, and then began.

"William," she muttered into the radio.

"Yeah?" William's voice answered.

"Somebody stepped on a tube of paint in aisle twelve."

An exasperated sigh came from William's end of the channel. "What kind of paint?"

"Hold on," Annie said. She knelt down and, with visible disgust, used one finger to flip the tube over.  
"Oil." She informed William.

"Dammit."

There was a slapping sound somewhere on the opposite end of the store. It began to get louder, and Annie recognised it as the sound of William's shoes hitting the tiles.  
He always rushed to such "emergencies."  
Within seconds, William flew into view, clutching a rag, a metal scraper, and some sort of petroleum-based cleaning substance known solely as "Lift Up."

She studied him carefully as he stood there, waiting to be directed toward the spill.  
He looked unwell.

Dark circles decorated the underside of his eyes, and his hair was pushed away from his face in a manner that rendered it almost upright. It was apparent that he'd forgotten to shave the past few days.  
Annie gave him a "what are you waiting for" look and he disappeared into aisle twelve.  
She resolved to ask him what was up once he finished.

Minutes later, he emerged, victorious. He prepared to go off to his next task, but Annie blocked his path with her arm.  
"You look like you haven't slept in a while, man," she started, sounding genuinely concerned. "Is there something wrong?"

In a low, conspiratorial tone, William whispered "Do you know anything about Silent Hill?"


	2. Wicked and Winged Things

"Silent Hill… it's a resort town." Annie explained between sips of coffee.  
Well, not coffee—soy _mochaccino_. Whenever ordering the beverage, Annie would enunciate the second word with great care.

It was a daily ritual for her to visit the Crazy Bean coffee shop immediately after her shift ended, so when William approached her needing to talk, she simply asked him what he was doing after work and then, without waiting for a response, proceeded to pull him along with her.

"I went there a few times with my cousin when I was little," Annie continued, gripping her cup with one hand and running the other hand back and forth across the series of metal Xs which collectively formed the top of their table.  
"He seemed to like it. When he got married, he and his wife went over there, and _she_ was especially fond of it."

William stared at her from behind his own cup as he took a deep sip of coffee—just regular coffee, devoid of any sort of title which always had to be spoken cautiously.  
After setting his cup down, his hand jolted upright along with the rest of his arm, his index finger outstretched as if to say "eureka!"  
Anticlimactically, he unfolded his hand and looked up at the umbrella-like fixture hovering over the table. Annie eyed him curiously and his head dropped into its previous position.

For a second, the two just glared at each other blankly. William gradually lowered his opened hand and once more lifted up his cup to his face, his wide eyes peering out from behind it, beckoning for Annie to say something else about the town.  
Something strange or frightening.

There was an odd clanging noise as Annie pulled her chair closer toward the table.  
"In fact, Silent Hill was the last place he went with his wife before they both disappeared."  
She took what was presumably the last drink of her mocha-thing and took aim for the nearest trashcan, poised to launch her cup. It bounced silently off of the side of the bin.  
A man who was discarding his own trash bent down and picked it up. He mouthed the word "why" and shook his head before properly disposing of it.

"It was all over the news for a while. Channel 6 interviewed me." Annie persisted.  
Suddenly, inexplicably, William became incredibly attentive.  
"I'm pretty sure I remember that," he spoke. "What was your cousin's name?"  
Annie's head drooped slightly.  
"His name—"  
She stood up halfway through her sentence.  
"—was James."

* * *

A sense of melancholy pervaded William as he unlocked his car door, and his environment somewhat reflected his demeanor—at the exact moment the car's roof covered his head, the clouds covered the sun, casting unusually dark shadows across the urban landscape.

By the time William rolled through the front gate of his apartment complex, the air was like ink.  
_India ink,_ he mused, studying the space his headlights illuminated as he pulled into a parking spot. He stepped out of the vehicle, looked down, and smiled. The car was perfectly parallel to the lines.

Looking back up, however, elicited a frown—the main entrance appeared abnormally far from the center of the parking lot, almost as if the ground beneath him was attempting to stretch itself.  
His march to the door was accordingly tiring, and as he passed through the doorframe and began ascending the three flights of stairs (which, that evening, was an odyssey of its own), he resolved to actually _sleep_ once he reached his bed.

Approximately thirty seconds later, William arrived at his door, which protested noisily as he opened it, creaking in such a manner that William swore he could almost hear it saying "leave me alone."  
Before entering completely, he stopped at the door and nearly slammed an outstretched arm into the inside wall, searching for the light switch. He found it and continued his trek, bringing the door with him.

Suddenly, he was compelled to once again cease movement—the atmosphere didn't feel quite right to him. A quick study of his surroundings confirmed his suspicions: the entire apartment was grey, save for the area surrounding his bedroom door, which was a gradient from the medium grey to a sickly shade of light green. Closer observation of the walls in the green area revealed a small strip consisting of a multitude of miniscule, haphazardly connected lines drawn onto the wall in a darker shade of green.

William automatically recognised the pattern followed by the lines.  
They were the veins of a human arm.

"Oh, hell," he muttered before strolling past the patch of green back in to the grey, making his way to a hopelessly unorganised desk. Even nearly a year after his diagnosis (and subsequent prescriptions), it wasn't uncommon for the environment—or really, his _perception _of the environment—to arbitrarily shift into such a state.  
Learning that these changes were probably in his head did however alleviate the fear he once felt when they occurred. They now merely annoyed him.

He sifted through the grey mass of paper and books which had accumulated on the desk, and dug out a moderately-sized book containing illustrations of the circulatory system. All of its illustrations were similarly achromatic.  
He came across a high-resolution shot of all of the veins and arteries in an arm, mentally blocked out the arteries to focus on the veins, and drew a quick comparison between the photograph and the lines on his wall.

"Everything's in place," William found himself speaking out loud, "median cubital, basilic, median antebrachial…"  
The book closed with a dull_thud_, and he placed it back on the desk, prepared to ignore any bizarre qualities his apartment was exhibiting so that he could finally sleep.

Fate seemed to have other plans, however; another thud resounded from behind him as he took his first step toward the bedroom.  
He spun around on one foot to face the source of the noise, only to notice that his tiny "kitchen" area was spewing some sort of mist, which he initially thought to be smoke.  
His certainty disintegrated right before he decided to run into the hall to find the fire extinguisher, as the mist reached him and he felt its cool moisture.

William then came to find he had a new problem, for just as the mist's feeling was cool, its stench was rancid.

Like death.

Nearly choking, and wary of the mist's threat to envelop him, William pulled his shirt over his nose and mouth before grabbing a penlight from a holder on the untidy desk.  
He assigned himself the mission of determining the cause of the mist, then raised and turned on the penlight.

The narrow beam of light pierced the obscurity of the misty kitchen, though still all William could see were shadows.  
Shadows were good enough, he supposed, just as he witnessed another shadow materialise… a shadow shaped like an impossibly thin man.

As startled as William was by this, his level of shock was nothing compared what it was when the mist suddenly dissipated.

The man was not a man. At least, not anymore.  
It had the appearance of being starved to death: essentially a skeleton wrapped in leathery skin which was about the same shade of green as the walls near his bedroom door, standing awkwardly with buckled knees and its hands held up to its chest. Its skeletal legs ended in toeless feet which had both nearly been cut in half, giving the impression of the figure having hooves.  
William's eyes widened when he caught sight of the hole in the creature's stomach, and gasped a second later when he realised the hole wasn't a wound—it was a mouth. Almost as if the stomach mouth sensed William's eyes upon it, it snapped shut and bared its teeth to him.

The creature's head was the only thing that truly frightened William. A crooked, practically flat nose sat between two sunken eyes, bloodshot and lacking pupils, while its lipless mouth hung agape, ridiculously wide, so that its chin fell a few inches past the start of its sternum.  
Thin poles made of some unknown material seemed to be prying its mouth open to that width, forming a mouth-cage reminiscent of William's childhood nightmares.  
Trapped behind the poles, much to William's horror, was a bat.  
A small human skull sat in place of the bat's head.

"Silent Hill," came a garbled voice from the creature's direction.  
William responded with the first words he could think of:

"Holy shit."


End file.
